..
... Maturing technology can quickly become de-skilled as automated
tools get developed so designers can harness the technology's power
without having to understand its inner workings.
The more that happens, the more engineers closest to the technology
become incapable of contributing improvements to it. And without such
user input, a technology can quickly ossify."
The readers overwhelmingly rejected these contentions. The rate of
innovation, they asserted, has actually accelerated with wider spread
education and more efficient weeding-out of unfit solutions by the
marketplace. "... Technology in the 21st
century is going to be less about discovering new phenomena and more
about putting known things together with greater imagination and
efficiency."
Many cited the S-curve to illuminate the current respite. Innovation is
followed by selection, improvement of the surviving models, shake-out
among competing suppliers, and convergence on a single solution.
Information technology has matured - but new S-curves are nascent:
nanotechnology, quantum computing, proteomics, neuro-silicates, and
machine intelligence.
Recent innovations have spawned two crucial ethical debates, though
with accentuated pragmatic aspects.
Pages:
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119